Thursday, July 07, 2011

Locus Award Winners

The Locus Awards were recently given out, in a ceremony so exciting that I couldn't settle down enough to write about it for more than a week. (Really. That's my reason for delaying this post, and I'm sticking to it.)

And those winners were:
Once again, I'm surprised and slightly disappointed at the love for Blackout and All Clear, which I'm beginning to believe proves that the modern spec-fic audience values bulk more than anything else.
 
Kraken is a good book, though I personally would have preferred to see The Fuller Memorandum win.

I'd also have rated Shades of Milk and Honey higher than Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which is a perfectly solid middle-of-the-road fantasy novel, but didn't thrill me. Shades is superficially smaller, but does something more difficult elegantly.

I can't complain about Ship Breaker, since I haven't read it. But I Shall Wear Midnight was damn good, so I have to assume that Ship Breaker is even better...or that Locus voters have different ideas of "good" than I do.

I complained about the Chiang novella when I wrote about the Hugo short fiction categories recently; it's not bad, but it's far below his usual standard, has no ending, and is both tedious and repetitive.

Yay for Fritz Leiber, though. Too bad he's been dead for a generation, but skiffy awards do seem to go to the oldest and creakiest writer more often than not.

I am still withholding judgement on the Heinlein bio, and will continue to do so until I read it. I suspect I shall have very strong views on it once I do read it.

Oh, and the Gaiman novella is damned strong -- I don't know most of the rest of the short fiction nominees, so I can make no useful comparison.

Congratulations to all of the winners, for what it's worth after my clearly non-congratulatory comments. And I assume all of the SFnal bookies are frantically re-setting their Hugo odds right now.

1 comment:

Rutila said...

Neil Gaiman (as much as I love him and consider him the second coming) is, admittedly, hit or miss, which is especially true of his short fiction. Smoke and Mirrors was wonderful, but Fragile Things never took off. His Locus wins this year were definitely hits and savored.

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